ИСТИНА

One of the symptoms of heart failure, as well as a number of other diseases or changes in the functional status of the human body, is edematous syndrome, which manifests itself in the accumulation of excess water in the tissues. At the moment, it is impossible to highlight a universal method for the quantitative determination of water content, which would make it possible to determine the water content deep in the tissues, while combining simplicity, non-invasiveness and accuracy of measurements. An excellent candidate for the role of such a method of measuring the water content in the skin is the diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy is already used to estimate the water content in the skin, however, most studies use a wavelength range from ~1300 to 2000 nm, where water has a high absorption coefficient - thus, the moisture content of the upper stratum corneum is measured, but not the water content in deeper layers of tissue. In this work, we assessed the possibility of estimating the water content in the deeper layers of the skin using diffuse reflection spectroscopy using less pronounced but yet observable water absorption lines in the short-wavelength range (900 - 1200 nm) by analyzing the diffuse reflection spectra simulated using the Monte Carlo method, analysis of diffuse reflectance spectra of optical phantoms of human skin, as well as using data of in vivo measurements. Additionally the mutual correlations of the water content with the values of other chromophores, which contribute to the absorption in the same wavelength range, were analyzed. We believe that these results can be applied in the sphere medical diagnostics to assess water content in the human dermis.